Wenjun Gu

Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Ohio State University
395 Dreese Laboratoris, 2015 Neil Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210
Phone: 614-292-8377 (O)
Fax: 614-292-2911
Email: gu(at)cse(dot)ohio-state(dot)edu
Office: Bolz Hall 118 

Brief Bio:

Wenjun Gu received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University in June 2008. His advisor was Dr. Dong Xuan. His broad research interests are in the areas of Network Security and Distributed Systems. Wenjun Gu received the Bachelors degree and the Masters degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2000 and 2003 respectively.

Research Interests:

· Security in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs): Security in WLANs has been receiving wide attention these years due to the wide deployment of WLANs. The first WLANs security standard, WEP, was shown to be weak across all aspects of security services. The current WLANs security standards, WPA and 802.11i, are believed to provide satisfactory privacy, integrity/replay protection. However, security vulnerabilities in authentication and availability have been disclosed in recent years. We would like to model those attacks, and propose defense mechanisms against them. [ICDCS’08]

· Security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): Providing secure communications in WSNs is especially challenging due to the salient features of WSNs. Random key pre-distribution based schemes were proposed to establish pairwise keys between neighboring sensor nodes. However, such schemes can only work in highly dense network due to an inherent limitation. We propose network decoupling to remove such limitation in key path construction, and propose a new secure communication protocol in WSNs. [IWQoS’06, TPDS’07]

WSNs are also vulnerable to physical attacks due to the small form factor of sensor nodes and the unattended operation after deployment. Such attacks have major impacts on network lifetime and topology. We model two types of physical attacks and propose defense mechanisms against them. [ICC’05, MASS’05]

· Security in Overlay and Peer to Peer Networks: Anonymous communication is used to preserve user privacy during communications. Traditional works on this area have been focusing on anonymous unicast communications. Anonymous communications for multicast services have been largely ignored. We design an anonymous communication protocol for multicast applications. [IPDPS’06, JPDC’06]

· Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks: Along with my colleagues, I study the impact of limited sensor node mobility on network coverage. We have designed an optimal centralized algorithm to maximize quality of network coverage given a network with randomly deployed sensor nodes with limited mobility. Furthermore, we have designed lightweight distributed algorithm to achieve near optimal network coverage. [TMC’07]

Representative Publications:

· Wenjun Gu, Xiaole Bai, Sriram Chellappan, Dong Xuan and Weijia Jia, Network Decoupling: A methodology for Secure Communications in Sensor Networks, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2007.

· Sriram Chellappan, Wenjun Gu, Xiaole Bai, Dong Xuan, Bin Ma and Kaizhong Zhang, Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks under Limited Mobility Constraints, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2007.

· Li Xiao, Yunhao Liu, Wenjun Gu, Dong Xuan and Xiaomei Liu, Mutual Anonymous Overlay Multicast, in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Special issue on Security in Grid and Distributed Systems (JPDC), September 2006.

· Wenjun Gu, Xiaole Bai, Sriram Chellappan and Dong Xuan, Network Decoupling for Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks, in Proceeding of IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), June 2006.

· Li Xiao, Xiaomei Liu, Wenjun Gu, Dong Xuan and Yunhao Liu, A Design of Overlay Anonymous Multicast Protocol, in Proceeding of IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), April 2006.

· Wenjun Gu, Xun Wang, Sriram Chellappan, Dong Xuan and Ten-Hwang Steve Lai, Defending against Search-based Physical Attacks in Sensor Networks, in Proceeding of IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), November 2005.

· Click Here for a complete list of my publications.

Last modified: June 6, 2008.